MODERN BIOGRAPHIES 



J. M. SYNGE 

AND THE 

IRISH DRAMATIC 
MOVEMENT 



OTHER VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

By Edward Thomas 

THE HAGUE SCHOOL 

By D. S. Meldrum 

STE. BEUVE 

By A. W. Evans 

SAMUEL BUTLER 

By T. Seccombe 

TOLSTOY 

By Edward Garnett 

MAHOMMED 

By Meredith Townsend 




J. M. SYNGE 

(From a photograph by James Paterson R.S.A.) 



J. M. SYNGE 

AND THE 

IRISH DRAMATIC 
MOVEMENT 



BY 

FRANCIS BICKLEY 



LONDON ! CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD. 
BOSTON & NEW YORK : HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

1912 



>7^ 5 £"33 

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NOTE 

In the following pages no attempt is made to 
give Synge his ultimate place in literary history. 
Two or three hundred years hence will be time 
enough to begin to think of doing that. My 
aim has been to show, roughly, where he stood 
in relation to his contemporaries and, still 
more roughly, in the line of English-written 
drama; and to analyse the qualities which 
make his work so notable. The pages deal- 
ing with the Irish Dramatic Movement are to 
be regarded as background. 

I must express my thanks to Mr. Yeats for 
his kindness in reading proofs and in giving 
me some valuable hints ; also to Mr. Yeats 
and Mr. Fisher Unwin for permission to print 
the poem To Ireland in the Coming Times, 





CONTENTS 




I. 


Synge's Career 


PAGE 

9 


II. 


Theory and Practice . 


. 19 


III. 


Synge's Plays . 


32 


IV. 


Yeats and the Movement 


. 49 


V. 


The Irish Theatre 


67 


VI. 


The Lyrists 


. 86 


VII. 


Synge's Poems 


92 



J. M. SYNGE AND THE IRISH 
DRAMATIC MOVEMENT 



SYNGE S CAREER 

John Millington Synge was born near 
Dublin in 1871, coming from a family 
which has long owned land in different 
parts of Ireland. He died at a private 
hospital in Dublin, March 24th, 1909. His 
physical life thus came to an early end. 
His artistic life, on the other hand — its 
creative phase at least — was late in be- 
ginning. Some four or five years of not 
exceptionally prolific production were the 
sum of it. 

It was not so much that Synge was 
abnormally late in finding himself, as 
that he had the unusual wisdom to bide 
his time. Thus, although in his travel- 
sketches and poems he has given us a 
glimpse of the raw material from which 
his plays were wrought, he has kept care- 

9 



J. M. SYNGE 

fully hidden the botchings of his 'prentice 
years. 

With his right material close at hand, 
he at first deliberately turned his back on 
it. As a boy he wandered among the 
Wicklow hills. 

I knew the stars, the flowers, and the birds, 
The grey and wintry sides of many glens, 
And did but half remember human words, 
In converse with the mountains, moors and fens, 

he writes. But he entered and graduated at 
Trinity College, Dublin, a proceeding which, 
according to patriotic Irishmen, withers 
art and right feeling at their sources. 

Synge, at any rate, after taking his 
degree, left his native land, and forgot 
what little Gaelic he had known. The 
desire of self-expression was already strong 
in him, but he sought his medium in France, 
in Germany and in Italy. He sought it 
also in books. From his poems, which are 
so intensely personal, one may gather a list 
of the authors of his predilection: Villon, 
Petrarch, Ronsard, Rabelais, Nash, Cer- 
vantes, Herrick. Characteristically, he was 
concerned with the ages when the quality 
of energy was at its height in European 

10 



SYNGKS CAREER 

literature ; but he was also reading more 
modern stuff. His wanderjahre fell in the 
'nineties, the day of symbolism and de- 
cadence, though, curiously enough, German 
rather than French influences are apparent 
in his fledgling literature. 

At this work Mr. William Butler Yeats 
found him in Paris, in 1897 or thereabouts, 
living in the state of poverty implied by 
a top floor in the Latin quarter. Mr. 
Yeats saw at once that the poems and 
essays Synge showed him were of no value, 
merely poor examples of the morbidities 
of the time, " images reflected from mirror 
to mirror." " He had wandered," writes 
the poet in his preface to Synge' s Well of 
the Saints , " among people whose life is 
as picturesque as the middle ages, playing 
his fiddle to Italian sailors, and listening 
to stories in Bavarian woods, but life had 
cast no light into his writings." Now it so 
happened that in these dying moments of 
the last century Mr. Yeats was at his 
grand climacteric. Not only was he, as it 
befell, nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, 
but he was also suffering a reaction against 
the influences of the day, and seeking 

11 



J. M. SYNGE 

simpler modes. He, too, had ventured, 
none more boldly, into the mysterious 
caves of symbolism, and had returned from 
his journey with much garnered wisdom, 
but with a new love for the sun. So he 
spoke his mind to his new friend. " Give 
up Paris," he said, " you will never create 
anything by reading Racine, and Arthur 
Symons will always be a better critic of 
French literature. Go to the Aran Islands. 
Live there as if you were one of the people 
themselves ; express a life that has never 
found expression." Many young Irish 
writers, have profited by Mr. Yeats' clear- 
sighted and uncompromising criticism ; 
but none more so than John Synge. 1 

Not that these European years of Synge' s 
were valueless. Probably no experience 

1 Synge and the Ireland of his Time, by W. B. Yeats, 
and A Note concerning a Walk through Connemara with 
Him, by J. B. Yeats. These and Mr. John Masefield's 
article in the Contemporary Review (April, 1911) are the 
best accounts of Synge the man we are likely to get. 
His manner, lean grey look, and tuft on nether lip gave 
him a slightly French look. Neither tall nor short, a thick 
moustache thwarted the play of the mouth, but the eyes, 
at once smoky and kindling, gave an impression of * 'a dark, 
grave face with a great deal in it." He had no perceptible 
accent. A looker-on, listening outside the circle, aiming 
at no brilliance, " his merriest talk was like playing catch 
with an apple of banter, which one afterwards ate and 
forgot." The gravity of his gaze was memorable. 

12 



SYNGE'S CAREER 

is utterly valueless to the artist ; and it 
may well be that contact with France 
taught him that clean, disillusioned view 
of life, which gives his plays their lucid 
reality. There is a sketch called Under 
Ether, an account of personal experiences, 
printed among his collected works, which 
Maupassant might have written. Further, 
if he had kept quite clear of the influences 
of the 'nineties, it is possible that he would 
not have developed to quite so perfect a 
state his gift of fastidious selection. 

But when all is said, the fact that so 
individual a writer as Synge was so ready 
to follow the advice of a chance critic, 
is proof almost positive that he felt he was 
off his proper track. He can hardly have 
believed in his own morbidezza. Certainly 
there is no trace of it in his published 
work. 

Synge went to Aran, a group of stony 
islands at the entrance of Galway Bay. 
There he lived the peasants' life, learned 
their language, and discovered his own 
capabilities. Of these days he has left 
record in a volume of sketches. The Aran 
Islands is a characteristic book. Although 

13 



J. M. SYNGE 

a chapter of autobiography, it has little 
to say directly of the development of the 
author's soul. By nature reticent, Synge 
had the objective and impersonal attitude 
of the true dramatist. One who knew him 
has said that in conversation he offered few 
opinions, talking mainly of people and 
events. He talked little indeed, preferring 
to watch and listen. So, though his articles 
on the Congested Districts show that he 
had thoughts for Ireland's welfare and 
desired Home Rule as a step towards a 
better national life, he was always the 
dispassionate observer rather than the 
theorist. He saw life in sharp and vivid 
detail, and grasped instinctively all that 
would be useful to the artist in him. 
The Aran Islands, and his other similar 
articles, are like cases of uncut crystals ; 
beautiful in themselves, but from which will 
be fashioned jewels still more beautiful. 

" On some days," he wrote, in one of his 
rare personal statements, " I feel this 
island as a perfect home and resting-place ; 
on other days I feel that I am a waif 
among the people. I can feel more with 
them than they can feel with me." This 

14 



SYNGE'S CAREER 

confession is very significant. One cannot 
see an object if one holds it close to one's 
eyes. The days of identification gave 
Synge insight, but for the most part he 
stood a little aloof, not so far as to lose the 
details of his vision, but not so near as to 
blur it. If he had become permanently 
merged with his surroundings, he might 
have become a lyric poet, but he would not 
have written the plays. It may be sur- 
mised that some of his poems belong to 
those days when he felt at home, but that 
the plays were the works of the " waif," 
the alien observant. They were not, it 
seems, written on the islands, but in 
London and Dublin. 

Synge' s entry of the theatrical world of 
Dublin was by no means triumphant. 
Even the superb Riders to the Sea failed 
at first to attract audiences. The Shadow 
of the Glen, his first play to be acted 
(October 1903), was received not with 
indifference, but with hostility. Satires 
on Irish town life, such as Mr. George 
Moore's Bending of the Bough, could be 
tolerated, but satire on the Irish peasantry 
— the time-honoured idol of sentimentalists 

15 



J. M. SYNGE 

— was in no wise to be borne. The favour- 
able comparison between Irish women and 
the women of England or Scotland in the 
matter of chastity, was a trump card in 
the hands of the Nationalists, Here was 
a writer who seemed to call it in question ; 
such a thing was impolitic, if no worse. 
It goes without saying that Synge had no 
desire to lower his compatriots in the eyes 
of the world. But if he had only found one 
unchaste woman in the four provinces 
and had thought her the right stuff for 
drama he would have dramatised her ; 
or if he had found none, he would have 
invented one had his purpose required it. 
For he was an artist before he was a 
Nationalist, and a very long way before. 
The political question did not exist for 
the dramatist. But to the majority of 
Irishmen art still means a political 
pamphlet. 

This prompt enmity to Synge' s work 
persisted. It was manifested against The 
Well of the Saints, first performed in 
February 1905, and culminated just two 
years later in the demonstration against 
The Playboy of the Western World, in which 
16 



SYNGE'S CAREER 

a man who is supposed to have killed his 
father is admired as a hero. The ethics of 
this play will be briefly discussed anon. 
According to " The Freeman's Journal " 
it was " calumny gone raving mad." 
That active body of extreme Nationalists, 
Sinn Fein, declared war, and at the second 
performance there was an organised inter- 
ruption. A number of men in the pit, 
some of whom were provided with trumpets, 
raised such a shindy that the actors were 
reduced to dumb show\ Outside the Abbey 
Theatre also the police were kept busy, 
and the press demanded the play's with- 
drawal. But the players went doggedly 
through the seven performances billed, and 
by the end of the week opinion had veered 
considerably in their favour. Opposition 
was not at an end, however ; there were 
demonstrations when the play was produced 
in London and America, and there were 
domestic dissensions which resulted in at 
least one able dramatist's temporary with- 
drawal from the National Theatre Society. 
But the leaders, concerned only for good 
drama, stood by Synge. The supreme 
importance of their discovery had at once 

b 17 



J. M. SYNGE 

dawned on them, and from the opening 
of the Abbey Theatre until his death, 
Synge was coequal with Mr. Yeats and 
Lady Gregory in the responsibility of 
choosing the plays to be performed there. 



18 



II 

THEORY AND PRACTICE 

Synge wrote six plays ; one of them left 
incomplete, two of them very short, none 
long enough to fill the stage for a London 
evening. On these he has established 
a reputation which was high at his death, 
has grown since, and seems as likely to be 
permanent as that of any man of his 
generation. It has been claimed for him 
that he is the greatest imaginative drama- 
tist who has written English since Shake- 
speare, or at least since the Puritans closed 
the theatres in 1642. The claim is not as 
big as at first sight it looks ; and even the 
conservative will find it hard to gainsay. 
To some extent, however, its validity 
depends on what one seeks in the theatre. 
Synge himself had very definite views 
on the drama, and he has stated them with 
the economy and precision which marks 
all his writing. 

" On the stage one must have reality, and one 
19 



J. M. SYNGE 

must have joy ; and that is why the intellec- 
tual modern drama has failed, and people 
have grown sick of the false joy of the musical 
comedy, that has been given them in place of 
the rich joy found only in what is superb and 
wild in reality. In a good play every speech 
should be as fully flavoured as nut or apple, 
and such speeches cannot be written by any- 
one who works among people who have shut 
their lips on poetry." 1 

" The drama is made serious — in the French 
sense of the word — not by the degree in which 
it is taken up with problems that are serious in 
themselves, but by the degree in which it gives 
the nourishment, not very easy to define, on 
which our imaginations live. . . . The drama, 
like the symphony, does not teach or prove 
anything. ... Of the things which nourish 
the imagination, humour is one of the most 
needful, and it is dangerous to limit or destroy 
it." 2 

This last pronouncement was evoked by 
the reception of The Playboy of the Western 
World. Certain Irish towns were ap- 
parently losing their humour. " In the 
greater part of Ireland, however," he con- 

1 Preface to The Playhoy of the Western World. 

2 Preface to The Tinkers Wedding. 

20 



THEORY AND PRACTICE 

soles himself, " the whole people, from the 
tinkers to the clergy, have still a life, 
and view of life, that are rich and genial 
and humorous.' ' He did not think that 
these people would mind being laughed 
at without malice. 

Art for Synge was an expression, not of 
life keyed down to the low pitch convenient 
for those who live in the narrow streets 
of civilisation, but of life " superb and 
wild." He would have approved of George 
Gissing's definition of art as " The ex- 
pression, satisfying and abiding, of the 
zest of life." Gissing's " zest " is Synge's 
" joy/' which is no more confined to 
comedy than his " seriousness " to tragedy 
or his " reality " to plays of modern life. 
They are the qualities which nourish the 
imagination by giving it food richer 
than the fare of ordinary experience. 
He had no sympathy with the drama 
that is concerned with the problems 
incidental to modern conditions, and 
differed from the founders of the Irish 
theatre in his scant reverence for " Ibsen 
and the Germans." 

One has always imagined Shakespeare 

21 



J. M. SYNGE 

going attentively about Stratford or the 
streets of London, taking notes here of a 
striking phrase, there of some trait of 
character sufficiently vivid or eccentric 
for the emphatic life of the stage. Mr. 
Bernard Shaw, in his amusing sketch of 
The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, has shown us 
his possible method ; but in The Aran 
Islands we have an authentic account of 
a modern artist doing this very thing, 
though neither the London of his day, nor 
even the Stratford-on-Avon, would have 
filled his notebooks. 

For though a certain savour of race- 
prejudice may be traced in some Irishmen's 
estimate of the Saxon tongue and of modern 
English literature, it is very clear that the 
stuff of drama is not so ready to hand as 
it was in Shakespeare's time. Otherwise 
it would certainly be used. The reason 
for this is at least twofold. In the first 
place our vitality is lower; we are prone 
to think about life instead of living it, 
so that even artists deal with special 
problems rather than with life as a whole. 
In the second place, our language has 
undoubtedly deteriorated from the level 

22 



THEORY AND PRACTICE 

of art to the level of journalism. One has 
only to compare the hastiest letter of the 
sixteenth or seventeenth century with one 
of the eighteenth or nineteenth to see 
this. The Elizabethans, and even Wyeher- 
ley and Congreve, could use speech which 
only differed from that of the market-place 
by being a finer selection ; but in the last 
two centuries the rift has gradually 
widened between literature and talk. A 
poetic language has developed which may 
be a very fine thing to read, but is of no 
value whatever for drama, which demands 
something more beautiful than ordinary 
speech, but of kindred nature. Conse- 
quently all that English dramatic literature 
has to show for two hundred years is the 
sentimental comedy of the eighteenth 
century, the dreary blank-verse efforts of 
the Victorian poets, and, more lately, 
the naturalistic sociologists. Only by keep- 
ing clear of reality altogether — far clearer 
than Congreve— have two moderns, Wilde 
and Shaw T — the one developing the comedy 
of manners, the other inventing the comedy 
of bad manners — contrived to produce 
plays which are very delightful, but not, 

23 



J. M. SYNGE 

it is to be feared, immortal. It may be 
urged that English genius has turned from 
the theatre to other forms of art ; that is 
self-evident, but the turn was made from 
necessity rather than from choice. When 
so virile a creator as Browning fails to 
become a dramatist one suspects the matter 
rather than the man. 

But " in Ireland," once more to quote 
Synge, " for a few years more, we have a 
popular imagination that is fiery and 
magnificent, and tender ; so that those of 
us who wish to write start with a chance 
that is not given to writers in places where 
the springtime of local life has been for- 
gotten, and the harvest is a memory only, 
and the straw has been turned into bricks/ ' 
He found in the Aran Islands and Con- 
nemara and Wicklow a peasantry which 
was perfect material for drama as he had 
come to believe it should be written ; 
or rather, acquaintance with the people 
awakened in him a perception of the sort 
of material the dramatist must use if 
his art is to be both human and beauti- 
ful. 

In this people, as he saw it — and he had 

24 






THEORY AND PRACTICE 

no sentimentality to mar his vision — 
the god and the beast were mixed in just 
proportions; corresponding to that juxta- 
position of exaltation and brutality which 
figures in his theory of poetry. Very 
significant is his story of the old man who, 
in " a freak of earthly humour," told him 
what he would have done if, in his youth, 
he could have had a girl alone with him in 
the beehive dwelling where he and Synge 
were sitting ; and then, a moment later, 
was reciting ancient Irish poetry in a 
manner which brought tears into his 
companion's eyes. This duality justifies 
Synge's making Mary Byrne, the drunken 
old reprobate of The Tinker's Wedding, 
break into such lyric utterance as : 

" That's a sweet tongue you have, Sarah 
Casey ; but if sleep's a grand thing, it's a grand 
thing to be waking up a day the like of this, 
when there's a warm sun in it, and a kind 
air, and you'll hear the cuckoos singing and 
crying out on the top of the hill." 

When people found fault with his characters 
he quoted a paragraph from an article 
of his own on the vagrants of Wicklow. 

25 



J. M. SYNGE 

" In all the circumstances of this tramp 
life there is a certain wildness that gives 
it romance and a peculiar value for those 
who look at life in Ireland with an eye 
that is aware of the arts also. In all the 
healthy movements of art variations from 
the ordinary type of manhood are made 
interesting for the ordinary man, and in 
this way only the higher arts are universal. 
Besides this art, however, founded on the 
variations which are a condition and effect 
of vigorous life, there is another art — 
sometimes confounded with it — founded on 
the freak of nature, in itself a mere sign 
of atavism or disease. This latter art, 
which is occupied with the antics of the 
freak, is of interest only to the variations 
from ordinary minds, and, for this reason, 
is never universal. To be quite plain, 
the tramp in real life, Hamlet and Faust 
in the arts, are variations, but the maniac 
in real life, and Des Esseintes and all his 
ugly crew in the arts, are freaks only." 
It will be observed that Synge, who is 
never abnormal or morbid, has tramps or 
tinkers prominent in three of his plays ; 
finding them a little richer in life than the 

26 






THEORY AND PRACTICE 

ordinary man, and making them a little 
richer again than he found them. 

As with his characters, so with his plots. 
That of The Shadow of the Glen follows 
closely a story which he heard in Inish- 
maan, one of the Aran Islands. An 
anecdote of a man who killed his father 
with a spade was the germ of The Playboy ; 
another, of a woman who saw her son, 
long drowned, riding on horseback sea- 
wards, must have suggested the climax 
of Riders to the Sea. Again, the story 
which he heard in Wicklow, of two tinkers 
who agreed with a priest to marry them 
for half a sovereign and a tin can, developed 
into The Tinker's Wedding. Each of these 
incidents, slight as some of them were 
when told him, has, at the outset, a wilder, 
livelier tinge than the normal occurrences 
of daily life as we know it. Played on by 
his vivid imagination it developed into a 
richly coloured work of art. 

So again with the language of the plays. 
One has only to read The Playboy or 
Riders — or hear them finely declaimed by 
the Irish actors — to recognise that a stage 
speech has been created more adequate 

27 



% 



J. M. SYNGE 

in its energy and beauty than anything, 
at least, since Lady Wishfort abused her 
maid, or Millament dictated terms to 
Mirabell. Yet Synge claimed never, or 
hardly ever, to have used word or phrase 
which he had not heard among the Irish 
peasantry. He found the English of these 
people, whose proper speech is Gaelic, 
a " curiously simple yet dignified language " 
spoken with a " delicate exotic intonation 
that was full of charm " ; and these quali- 
ties of simplicity and dignity, rhythm, 
delicacy, and strangeness are the qualities 
of his prose. 

Nevertheless, he did not accept this 
folk-language in the gross. As with his 
characters and his situations, he bettered 
what was already good by fastidious selec- 
tion and blending. Here, perhaps, more 
than anywhere are visible the effects of 
his training in Paris, his knowledge of 
elaborate literature. For all his energy 
he was an artist eclectic and austere, and 
it was in language that his art was most 
triumphant. "In a good play," he held, 
" every speech should be as fully flavoured 
as a nut or apple." But in careless converse 

28 



THEORY AND PRACTICE 

many words — though fewer in Inishmaan 
than in London — must always run to waste. 
The borders of the finest unpremeditated 
speech must be trimmed before it is suited 
for the shapely life of the stage. There is 
one very interesting instance of how Synge 
used his material. An old man said to 
him : 

" Listen to what I'm telling you : a man 
who is not married is no better than an old 
jackass. He goes into his sister's house, and 
into his brother's house ; he eats a bit in this 
place and a bit in another place, but he has no 
home for himself ; like an old jackass straying 
on the rocks." 

This is vivid enough, but in The Playboy 
of the Western World it becomes : 

" What's a single man, I ask you, eating 

a bit in one house and drinking a sup in 

another, like an old braying jackass strayed 
upon the rocks ? " 

The somewhat rambling original is pruned 
down to its essentials without sacrifice 
of any of its picturesqueness. Synge, 
having discarded the mechanical aid of 

29 



J. M. SYNGE 

blank verse, was entirely dependent on 
his own sense of form for his effects. His 
art was literally a criticism, a choosing. 

Character, situation and language he 
thus borrowed from actual life, improving 
and embellishing them, but never altering 
their essence. His plays are never sym- 
bolical, his characters never projections of 
his own moods and ideas, as with Maeter- 
linck or Mr. Yeats. But, when all is said, 
no sincere artist has ever produced abso- 
lutely impersonal work. He depicts things 
as he sees them, and each has his peculiar 
mental vision. So Synge's work, though 
objective in method, is subjective in so 
far as it is coloured by his own tempera- 
ment. The plays are bound together, 
and separated from all others, by some- 
thing less material than their distinctive 
language ; they are the work, not only 
of one hand, but of one soul. The moods 
of his various plays — laughter and passion 
and knavery — were what he saw in the 
world ; but the light in which he saw them 
was his own, a clear hard light, shining 
neither through rosy nor through smoky 
glass. If there be an actual reality in things 

30 



THEORY AND PRACTICE 

— an authentic value to stultify all our 
illusions — Synge was one of the few who 
have got very near to seeing it. For that 
reason sentimentalists considered him a 
cynic. 



31 



Ill 

synge's plays 

The Shadow of the Glen, which offended 
serious-minded Nationalists because it por- 
trayed an Irishwoman a little light in her 
loving, seems to have been the first finished 
as well as the first performed of Synge's 
plays. Founded on an Aran story, its 
scene is set in Wicklow, which recalls 
the author's remark that in parts of 
Wicklow the language was " in some ways 
more Elizabethan than the English of 
Connaught, where Irish was used till a 
much later time." One does not imagine 
that Synge was guilty of a pedantic 
scrupulosity in this coincidence, but he 
certainly located his plays in the east 
as often as in the west. 

Be that as it may, there is no poverty 
of language in In the Shadow of the Glen. 
Besides the indecorous Nora, the charac- 
ters are her husband, Dan Burke, who 
pretends to be dead to test her, a timid 
young herd, Micheal Dara, of a type 

32 



SYNGE'S PLAYS 

which reappears in The Playboy, and one 
of Synge's tramps. The situation is full 
of grim humour. The ending may be 
quoted as illustrating all Synge's charac- 
teristic virtues. 

" Tramp (at the door). Come along with me 
now, lady of the house, and it's not my blather 
you'll be hearing only, but you'll be hearing the 
herons crying out over the black lakes, and 
you'll be hearing the grouse and the owls with 
them, and the larks and the big thrushes when 
the days are warm, and it's not from the like 
of them you'll be hearing a talk of getting old 
like Peggy Cavanagh, and losing the hair off 
you, and the light of your eyes, but it's fine 
songs you'll be hearing when the sun goes up, 
and there'll be no old fellow wheezing, the like 
of a sick sheep, close to your ear. 

Nora. I'm thinking it's myself will be 
wheezing that time with lying down under the 
Heavens when the night is cold ; but you've 
a fine bit of talk, stranger, and it's with your- 
self I'll go. (She goes towards the door, then 
turns to Dan.) You think it's a grand thing 
you're after doing with your letting on to be 
dead, but what is it at all ? What way would 
a woman live in a lonesome place the like of this 
place, and she not making a talk with the men 



J. M. SYNGE 

passing ? And what way will yourself live from 
this day, with none to care for you ? What is 
it you'll have now but a black life, Daniel 
Burke, and it's not long I'm telling you, till 
you'll be lying again under that sheet, and you 
dead surely. 

(She goes out with the Tramp. Micheal is 
slinking after them, but Dan stops him.) 

Dan. Sit down now and take a little taste of 
the stuff, Micheal Dara. There's a great drouth 
on me, and the night is young. 

Micheal (coming back to the table). And it's 
very dry I am, surely, with the fear of death 
you put on me, and I after driving mountain 
ewes since the turn of the day. 

Dan (throwing away his stick). I was think- 
ing to strike you, Micheal Dara, but you're a 
quiet man, God help you, and I don't mind 
you at all. 

(He pours out two glasses of whisky, and gives 
one to Micheal.) 

Dan. Your good health, Micheal Dara. 

Micheal. God reward you, Daniel Burke, 
and may you have a long life, and a quiet life, 
and good health with it. 

(They drink.) 

Riders to the Sea is one of those achieve- 
ments before which the voice of criticism 

34 



SYNGES PLAYS 

is dumb. Tiny as is its scale, it is as 
plainly stamped with greatness as Hamlet 
or the Agamemnon. It is the most imagina- 
tive, the most passionate of all Synge's 
work, yet as true as any to the life he was 
seeking to express. All the terror of life 
in the fretted islands, all the mystery and 
cruelty of the sea are in it, and the pagan- 
ism bred therefrom, the ironic fatalism 
which can synthesise the almighty and 
most merciful Father with the " blind gods 
that cannot spare." " The maternal feeling 
is so powerful in these islands that it 
gives a life of torment to the women," 
Synge observed ; and " on these islands 
the women live only for their children." 
This play is his commentary, with the 
mother's cry when the last of her six sons 
rides down to the waters that have de- 
stroyed the rest : 

" If it was a hundred horses, or a thousand 
horses you had itself, what is the price of a 
thousand horses against a son where there is 
one son only ? " 

And the hardness that must come when 
life is at everlasting and hopeless war 

35 



J. M. SYNGE 

with the elements is in the daughter's 
words : 

" It's the life of a young man to be going on 
the sea, and who would listen to an old woman 
with one thing and she saying it over ? " 

And the bitterness of futile revolt is in 
the mother's complaint : 

" In the big world the old people do be 
leaving things after them for their sons and 
children, but in this place it is the young men 
do be leaving things behind for them that do 
be old." 

But the tragedy of the old woman's 
revolt is as nothing to the tragedy of her 
resignation when the tale of her loss is 
complete : 

" They're all gone now, and there isn't any- 
thing the sea can do to me. . . , I'll have no 
call now to be up crying and praying when the 
wind breaks from the south, and you can hear 
the surf is in the east, and the surf is in the 
west, making a great stir with the two noises, 
and they hitting one on the other. I'll have no 
call now to be going down and getting Holy 
Water in the dark nights after Samhain, and 
I won't care what way the sea is when the other 
women will be keening." 

36 



SYNGE'S PLAYS 

Beside this, most poetry about the sea is 
empty rhetoric. 

^The Tinker's Wedding, though the last 
play to be published in Synge's lifetime, 
was actually begun before either The 
Shadow of the Glen or Riders to the Sea. It 
was, however, rewritten before publication. 
Its contrast with Riders to the Sea is com- 
plete. It is the lightest - hearted of all 
Synge's plays, the joyous story of how three 
tinkers outwitted a priest. The mixture of 
the sordid and the imaginative, especially 
manifest in the character of old Mary Byrne, 
gives the dominant flavour, both here and 
in The Well of the Saints. 

The last-named play is unique among 
Synge's work, in that it has a supernatural 
element. Partly, perhaps, for this reason, 
but mainly from some less tangible 
defect, it is not so interesting as any of the 
others. Two blind beggars, old and ugly, 
man and wife, have been told by their 
neighbours that they are the most beautiful 
woman, the handsomest man, to be seen 
thereabouts. A saint restores their sight 
with holy water, but their gratitude is 
turned to rage when they learn their real 



J. M. SYNGE 

condition. In the end their blindness 
returns, but their illusion is gone for ever. 
Synge's laughter is nowhere more bitter 
than in this play, and his language lacks 
none of its wonted richness. But, for one 
reason or another, the imagination is less 
fully fed than usual ; the feast of reality 
and joy is served in a measure which 
(lavish enough for most) is for Synge 
comparatively niggard. 

The motive of The Well of the Saints, 
the Irish preference for the dream before 
the reality, is also the motive of the much- 
discussed Playboy of the Western World. 
The audience was angry, among other 
reasons, because it thought Synge implied 
that the peasantry of Mayo considered it 
a heroic act to kill one's father. As a 
matter of fact he did nothing of the sort. 
Politics had blinded its victims to psycho- 
logy as well as to art. 

Christy Mahon comes into Michael 
James's shebeen a stranger and a fugitive. 
This is quite enough to stir the interest 
of imaginative folk. Flattered by curiosity, 
Christy gradually unfolds his tale. A 
braggart and a coward, but gifted with 

38 



SYNGE'S PLAYS 

words, he casts a glamour over the sordid 
business, which, in Pegeen's eyes, is 
heightened by contrast with the cautious 
propriety of her cousin and destined hus- 
band. The scheming of the detestable widow 
Quin to get Christy away from the shebeen 
makes the girl ready to go any lengths to 
keep him. With every telling of his tale 
some heroic detail is added, and his success 
in the sports brings him to the crest of 
the wave. This is a perfectly natural 
development, and implies nothing more 
criminal than a bias towards romance. 
But when Christy's father makes his 
appearance, and the boy, to justify him- 
self, is goaded into attempting, before the 
eyes of his admirers, the deed which he has 
boasted to have done so well, the scales 
fall from the eyes of the cheated peasants, 
and they are zealously bent on retribution. 
So it seems that, after all, they are as 
sound morally as aesthetically. 

Though not so perfect as the two short 
plays with which Synge entered literature, 
The Playboy is the fullest and most elabo- 
rate of all his works. The situation is 
more complex, the character-drawing more 

39 



J. M. SYNGE 

detailed, than any he had yet attempted. 
It is to this play that the epithet Eliza- 
bethan can most aptly be applied. It is a 
little world of vigorously painted men and 
women, in whose doings and sayings 
tragedy and comedy are present in equal 
and inextricable measure. Its language 
is rich with humour and beauty. The only 
fault is that the last act moves a little too 
slowly; but this defect is small in com- 
parison with the pleasure that the whole 
affords. 

During his last illness, Synge was at 
work on a play of a different order. This 
contemner of queens, as he showed himself 
in his poems, was busy in dramatising the 
story of Deirdre and the sons of Usna. 
He did not have time to perfect this play. 
But it was his wont to write several 
versions of his plays, and one version of 
Deirdre of the Sorrows was found to be 
in a fit state for performance and publi- 
cation. 

Synge was not the first among the modern 
Irish writers to make Deirdre the heroine 
of a tragedy. Her story, which was one of 
the Three Sorrowful Stories of Ireland, 

40 



SYNGE'S PLAYS 

is the most moving and the most popular 
of all Gaelic legends. Two plays, with her 
name for title, had already been acted in 
Dublin. Now the writers of these plays, 
Mr. Yeats and A. E., have the gift of 
pure lyric in a greater measure, probably, 
than any other men of their race now 
living. Their Deirdres, though A. E.'s is 
in prose, are both very beautiful poems. 
Each of them, however, when viewed as 
drama, has the defects of plays written 
by those who are too much poets. They 
are better to read than to see on the 
stage. Mr. Yeats and A. E. had become 
playwrights mainly because of the needs of 
the national dramatic movement, and their 
work in consequence is artistic and sincere, 
but naturally fails to display the virtues 
of the born dramatist. 

Synge, on the other hand, was a born 
dramatist, and nothing else. His natural 
trade was play-writing ; and his Deirdre of 
the Sorrows, like all his plays, is at least as 
vivid on the stage as in the book. It would 
seem that he used the story not because 
he wanted to do reverence to a national 
legend, but because he saw dramatic 

41 



J. M, SYNGE 

possibilities in it ; just as Shakespeare 
used the tale of Lear or Macbeth. He had 
none of the awe of his material which is 
the modern romantic's characteristic atti- 
tude. He had, one might almost say, a 
contempt for his original. Neverthe- 
less he was more faithful to its spirit 
than either Mr. Yeats or A. E., who treated 
it with greater reverence. This is not 
a paradox. In pagan legends, whether 
Irish or otherwise, the romantic element is 
always conspicuously absent. Romance 
is an aftergrowth. It is the hush in the 
voice of the modern world, standing in 
worship before antiquity. Tennyson, pour- 
ing this bated modern spirit into the 
loves of Guinevere and Lancelot, spoiled 
the story of all its ancient joy. So Mr. 
Yeats and A. E. have given Deirdre a 
dreamy modern beauty in place of the 
rich vitality which was once hers. But 
Synge was one of the few moderns who are 
sufficiently vigorous by nature not to 
stand at gaze before the vitality of another 
age. There is no " Celtic melancholy " 
in the early stories of Deirdre ; they are 
crudely material. In the Leinster version 

42 



SYNGE'S PLAYS 

Deirdre lives for a year with Conchubor 
after Naisi's death, and then commits 
suicide in a very brutal fashion. Synge, 
indeed, like the others, ignores this, and 
makes Deirdre's death follow immediately 
on her lover's ; for the original ending is 
inartistic, a flagrant anticlimax. But 
essentially Deirdre of the Sorrows is as full 
of life as any prototype, and that is not 
because Synge was a careful antiquary, 
skilled to reproduce spirit as well as letter, 
but because he was not an antiquary at 
all. He filled the bones of an old tale 
with his own spirit. It is only the really 
vigorous artist, with no reverence what- 
ever for any work but his own, who may 
thus create afresh what older minds have 
already created. 

Deirdre of the Sorrows is as full of life as 
The Playboy of the Western World. Tragic 
in the highest sense, it never ceases to be 
human. "At your age," says Naisi to 
Lavarcham, " you should know there 
are nights when a king like Conchubor 
would spit upon his arm ring, and queens 
will stick their tongues out at the rising 
moon. ,, These are strange words for 

43 



J. M. SYNGE 

a hero of romance ; and even though some 
homeliness would always be in keeping 
with the character of the old woman 
Lavarcham, she gets very far from the 
grand style when she talks about the High 
King being in a blue stew. The sinister 
and enigmatic character of Owen, deliber- 
ately introduced by Synge for the sake of 
contrast and solidity, but not developed 
as far as he would have been had Synge 
lived, is the most Elizabethan figure in 
the plays. He is one of the " variations 
from the ordinary type of manhood," 
which his creator saw alike in the tramps 
of Irish highways and in Hamlet. 

Deirdre herself, though superb when 
superbness is apt, is a very human figure. 
Her farewell to Alban has the same pathos 
as Pegeen Mike's grief for her shattered 
illusions. 

" Woods of Cuan, woods of Cuan, dear 
country of the east ! It's seven years we've 
had a life was joy only, and this day we're 
going west, this day we're facing death, maybe, 
and death should be a poor, untidy thing, 
though it's a queen that dies." 

Pity shows here, as it rarely shows in 

44 



SYNGE'S PLAYS 

Synge's work ; but it is pity for the woman 
rather than the queen. " Queens get old, 
Deirdre," says Owen, " with their white 
and long arms going from them, and their 
backs hooping. I tell you it's a poor thing 
to see a queen's nose reaching down to 
scrape her chin." 

The idea that even Deirdre will grow old 
is the central idea of the play. Fergus, 
Conchubor's councillor and Naisi's friend, 
harps on it, and Naisi himself confesses 
that he has known the fear that some day 
he will wake to find Deirdre less lovely. 
Deirdre overhears this confession, and 
because of it, and in spite of Naisi's passion- 
ate eating of his words, insists that the 
pleasant life in Alban must end. By this 
note of mortal frailty, which recurs in 
the bitterness between Naisi and Deirdre 
at the very last, this ancient story, which 
had passed through the rarefying flames of 
romanticism, regains the vitality which 
in the beginning had been so great as to 
keep it alive for centuries. 

Yet, when all is said, the play is a tragedy 
and a poem. Fate broods over it and 
beauty informs it. Synge's prose, be it 

45 



J. M. SYNGE 

repeated, could either smell of the earth 
or reflect the light of the stars. And though 
its loftier aspect is shown in each of the 
plays, it naturally has the greatest scope 
in Deirdre of the Sorrows, where, however 
modern the spirit, the externals at least are 
of an antique beauty. Thus does Pegeen 
Mike, in The Playboy, order her trousseau : 

" Six yards of stuff for to make a yellow 
gown. A pair of lace boots with lengthy heels 
on them and brassy eyes. A hat is suited for 
a wedding-day. A fine tooth comb. To be 
sent with three barrels of porter in Jimmy 
FarrelFs creel cart on the evening of the coming 
Fair to Mister Michael James Flaherty. With 
the best compliments of this season. Margaret 
Flaherty." 

Thus speaks Deirdre in her pride : 

" I will dress like Emer in Dundealgan, or 
Maeve in her house in Connaught. If Con- 
chubor'll make me a queen, I'll have the right 
of a queen who is a master, taking her own 
choice and making a stir to the edges of the 
sea. . . • Lay out your mats and hangings 
where I can stand this night and look about 
me. Lay out the skins of the rams of Con- 
naught and of the goats of the west. I will not 

46 



SYNGE'S PLAYS 

be a child or plaything ; I'll put on my robes 
that are the richest, for I will not be brought 
down to Emain as Cuchulain brings his horse 
to the yoke, or Conall Cearneach puts his 
shield upon his arm ; and maybe from this day 
I will turn the men of Ireland like a wind 
blowing on the heath." 

The theatre to-day has little to offer 
that can be compared with Miss Maire 
O'Neill's utterance of these words. 

Nor are the beauties of Deirdre of the 
Sorrows merely picturesque. Notwith- 
standing the grotesque and homely relief, 
the play moves steadily upwards to its 
superb climax in Deirdre' s last passion 
and the sudden coming of grey old age 
on baffled Conchubor. The final scene 
shows Synge's greatness as a tragic artist 
even more eminently than Riders to the 
Sea, because in the later play he has to 
deal with a greater complexity of emotion. 

Thus Synge, having written five plays 
of modern life, began another of which the 
story, at least, was very old. The question 
of what this portended is, unhappily, un- 
answerable ; but it is not perhaps an utterly 

47 



J. M. SYNGE 

fruitless field of discussion. One's con- 
jecture depends on one's reading of the 
dramatist. 

The too obvious theory that the tran- 
sition from The Playboy to Deirdre marks 
a definite change in Synge's ideas of his 
art, is sufficiently discredited by the 
essential homogeneity of the two^plays. 
On the other hand, it is very probable 
that he intended permanently to enlarge 
his field. Rich as was the life which he 
expressed in the earlier plays, he could 
scarcely have worked indefinitely over such 
limited ground. The danger of at last 
becoming mechanical would have been 
almost unavoidable. It is likely, there- 
fore, that, unless he had come with his 
trained vision to see dramatic stuff in the 
life of cities or of foreign countries, he 
would have often taken his themes from 
stories already told. So long as it is good, it 
is of very little moment where the artist finds 
his material ; and Synge, one may be sure, 
would never have used any but the best. 1 

1 Mr. Yeats tells me that, at the time when he was 
writing Deirdre of the Sorrows, Synge told him that he 
was sick of the Irish peasant on the stage, and that he 
was contemplating a play of Dublin slum life, 

48 



IV 

YEATS AND THE MOVEMENT 

Granted the meeting with Mr. Yeats, 
it is not likely that Synge's subsequent 
work would have been other than it was, 
even if no Irish dramatic movement had 
been at the time on foot. Many admirable 
dramatists have come into being purely 
on account of the needs of the Irish 
National Theatre Society and the en- 
couragement it has offered. Synge, on 
the other hand, having once found that 
drama was his business and Ireland his 
quarry, would have worked on without 
external stimulus. Still, though neither 
parent nor child of the movement, he 
became one of its most prominent figures 
and has left his mark on its development. 
Moreover, it gave him a stage, adequate 
interpreters, and an audience, without 
which things even the finest dramatist 
is not very much better than " an old 
braying jackass strayed upon the rocks." 

Rightly to appreciate this movement, 
it is necessary to understand, rather in its 

d 49 



J. M. SYNGE 

organic development than in its individual 
manifestations, the work of the man who 
for nearly twenty years has been the 
dominant figure in Irish letters. It has 
been shown how a crisis in Mr. Yeats' 
life, rather than in Synge's own, determined 
the latter' s destiny. So with almost the 
whole of modern Irish literature, both 
poetry and drama, its progress is in- 
extricably interwoven with the spiritual 
progress of William Butler Yeats. 

Anthologies of Irish poetry usually start 
with Goldsmith, who was Irish only by 
birth and a poet only by eighteenth- 
century standards. Tom Moore did not 
add much to his country's glory, though he 
compiled her history and wrote a couple of 
lyrics which only make his normal banali- 
ties the more intolerable. The nineteenth 
century saw a vast flood of poetry more 
remarkable for its political fervour than 
for its aesthetic excellence. The most 
renowned of these patriot rhymers were 
Jeremiah Joseph Callanan (1795-1829), 
John Banim (1798-1842), James Clarence 
Mangan (1803-49), Edward Walsh (1805- 
50), Sir Samuel Ferguson (1810-86), Thomas 

50 



YEATS AND THE MOVEMENT 

Osborne Davis (1814-45), and Sir Charles 
Gavan Duffy (1816-1903). Chief of these, 
from the point of view of their most ardent- 
admirers, was Davis. One of the founders 
of The Nation, heart and soul of the Young 
Ireland party, he will always be remem- 
bered with Smith O'Brien, Gavan Duffy 
and John Mitchel as a heroic figure in one 
act of the long struggle for Irish liberty. 
There is fine rhetoric as well as fine feeling 
in such things as The Lament for Owen 
Roe O'Neill, but Davis never got so near 
to achieving high poetry as did Ferguson 
or Mangan. Neither of these latter was as 
preoccupied with active politics as Davis, 
though Ferguson founded the Protestant 
Repeal Association as an ally to Young 
Ireland, and wrote a noble and sonorous 
lament for the man on whom he looked 
as the likeliest saviour of his country. 

Oh, brave young men, my love, my pride, my promise, 

Tis on you my hopes are set, 
In manliness, in kindness, in justice, 

To make Erin a nation yet : 
Self-respecting, self-relying, self-advancing, 

In union or in severance free and strong — 
And if God grant this, then under God, to Thomas Davis 

Let the greater praise belong. 

51 



J. M. SYNGE 

Ferguson's chief work was to make 
known to Irishmen the heroic legends of 
their land, and he did this both in collec- 
tions of stories and in poems that often 
have a fine barbaric note. He looked no 
lower than Homer for his model, and he had 
undoubted epic qualities, though marred, 
as they too often were, by a lack of self- 
criticism. 

Mangan, who stands with Savage and 
Poe and Verlaine among the poets of 
disordered lives, is nowadays generally 
allowed to be the foremost Irish writer of 
the old dispensation. Enthusiasts for 
Irish poetry invariably cite his Dark 
Rosaleen 1 to support their attitude. And 
though its constant position in the window 
may lead to suspicion of a lack of goods 
in the store which is not wholly justified, 
there is no question that that poem stands 
foremost of its type. Founded, as was so 
usual, on a Gaelic original, it is the best 
manifestation both of the ardent patriot- 

1 Dark Rosaleen is, of course, Ireland ; the Roisin 
Dubh of Thomas Furlong and Aubrey De Vere. The 
Rose, being both a mystical emblem and a symbol for 
Ireland, is a recurring figure in Mr. Yeats' poetry. 

52 



YEATS AND THE MOVEMENT 

ism and of the sadness which characterise 
this phase of the national literature. 

O my Dark Rosaleen, 

Do not sigh, do not weep ! 
The priests are on the ocean green, 

They march along the deep. 
There's wine from the royal Pope, 

Upon the ocean green ; 
And Spanish ale shall give you hope,, 

My Dark Rosaleen ! 

My own Rosaleen ! 
Shall glad your heart, shall give you hope, 
Shall give you health, and help, and hope, 

My Dark Rosaleen ! 

Over hills and through dales 

Have I roamed for your sake ; 
All yesterday I sailed with sails 

On river and on lake. 
The Erne at its highest flood, 

I dashed across unseen, 
For there was lightning in my blood, 

My Dark Rosaleen ! 

My own Rosaleen ! 
O ! there was lightning in my blood, 
Red lightning lightened through my blood, 

My Dark Rosaleen ! 

All day long, in unrest, 

To and fro do I move, 
The very soul within my breast 

Is wasted for you, love ! 

53 



J. M. SYNGE 

The heart in my bosom faints 

To think of you, my Queen, 
My life of life, my saint of saints, 

My Dark Rosaleen ! 

My own Rosaleen ! ( 
To hear your sweet and sad complaints, 
My life, my love, my saint of saints, 

My Dark Rosaleen ! 

Woe and pain, pain and woe, 

Are my lot, night and noon, 
To see your bright face clouded so, 

Like to the mournful moon. 
But yet will I rear your throne 

Again in golden sheen ; 
Tis you shall reign, shall reign alone, 

My Dark Rosaleen ! 

My own Rosaleen ! 
'Tis you shall have the golden throne, 
'Tis you shall reign, and reign alone, 

My Dark Rosaleen ! 

Over dews, over sands, 

Will I fly for your weal : 
Your holy, delicate white hands 

Shall girdle me with steel. 
At home in your emerald bowers, 

From morning's dawn till e'en 
You'll pray for me, my flower of flowers, 

My Dark Rosaleen ! 

My fond Rosaleen ! 
You'll think of me through daylight's hours, 
My virgin flower, my flower of flowers, 

My Dark Rosaleen ! 

54 



YEATS AND THE MOVEMENT 

I could scale the blue air, 

I could plough the high hills, 
O, I could kneel all night in prayer, 

To heal your many ills ! 
And one beamy smile from you 

Would float like light between 
My toils and me, my own, my true, 

My Dark Rosaleen ! 

My fond Rosaleen ! 
Would give me life and soul anew, 
A second life, a soul anew, 

My Dark Rosaleen ! 

O ! the Erne shall run red 

With redundance of blood, 
The earth shall rock beneath our tread, 

And flames warp hill and wood, 
And gun-peal and slogan cry, 

Wake many a glen serene, 
Ere you shall fade, ere you shall die, 

My Dark Rosaleen ! 

My own Rosaleen ! 
The judgment hour must first be nigh, 
Ere you can fade, ere you can die, 

My Dark Rosaleen ! 

Although Mangan never rose higher 
than this, he several times flew very near 
its level. But he did a large amount of 
really bad work ; and as for the majority 
of the men whom love of their country 
drove to song, their verses were nothing 

55 



J. M. SYNGE 

but poor copies of second-rate English 
or Scots models, such as Scott or Macaulay 
or Campbell : rhetorical fustian. On the 
other hand, more authentic poets, such 
as George Darley, were very little con- 
cerned to be national ; while Aubrey 
De Vere, though a fervent patriot, was 
first and foremost a devout Catholic. 
Certain poems of William Allingham's 
come nearest, in their delicate faery 
quality, to a distinctively Irish artistic 
utterance. They are, at any rate, most 
obviously akin with the work of the modern 
school. 

But none of these men quite answered 
to Mr. Yeats' idea of what an Irish poet 
should be. He resolved, therefore, to 
embody that idea in his own person, 
and to inspire others with an enthusiasm 
to do likewise. He wanted Irishmen to 
use the legendary material which their 
country offered in such abundance, but 
at the same time to utter nothing that was 
not the genuine expression of their own 
temperaments. To * use poetry, as the 
men of The Nation had done, for the 
enunciation of political opinions, was to 

56 



YEATS AND THE MOVEMENT 

degrade it. He thought that the artist's 
patriotism should be implicit rather than 
explicit ; that literature should be national, 
not Nationalist. " We cannot," he wrote, 
" move [the Irish leisured classes] from an 
apathy, come from their separation from 
the land they live in, by writing about 
politics or about Gaelic, but we may 
move them by becoming men of letters, 
and expressing primary emotions and 
truths in ways appropriate to this 
country." His first important poem, The 
Wanderings of Oisin, published in 1889, 
might have been written to support his 
thesis, were it not that it is too beautiful 
to have been written for any but its own 
sake. 

It was part of Mr. Yeats' creed that the 
writer's personal preoccupations should be 
given full play, otherwise his verse would 
soon ring false and rhetorical. He trusted 
to the Irish blood to give that common 
factor by which the school should be 
recognisable. His two most distinguished 
allies, for instance, were both Roman 
Catholics, and, like Aubrey De Vere, 
at least as much concerned with their 

57 



J. M. SYNGE 

religion as with their country. Katherine 
Tynan (Mrs. Tynan-Hinkson) has written 
of both with a Franciscan sweetness and 
simplicity ; Lionel Johnson with a high 
and delicate austerity. 

The death of Lionel Johnson at the age 
of thirty-five, in 1902, was a real loss to 
letters. An exquisite critic, he had main- 
tained that the dactylic and anapaestic 
measures which the Young Ireland writers 
had borrowed from the hated Englishman 
were quite inappropriate to the Celtic 
genius. His own work is testimony in 
favour of the graver cadences which he 
commended. His poetry, bathed in a pure 
white light, contrasts strikingly with the 
gorgeous colouring of the only other 
Catholic poet of recent years who can be 
compared with him for quality ; that is 
to say, of Francis Thompson. At its best 
it takes rank with the religious poetry of 
the seventeenth century, while Johnson's 
patriotism had nothing modern in its 
quiet chivalry. 

Both Johnson and Mr. Yeats were 
members of the Rhymers' Club, the select 
body of poets which used to meet at the 

58 



YEATS AND THE MOVEMENT 

" Cheshire Cheese " for the interchange of 
their utterances. Both contributed to 
that once notorious organ of the literary 
movement of the 'nineties, the Savoy. 
But Lionel Johnson, as an orthodox 
Catholic, could hardly follow some of the 
paths trodden by his curious generation. 
Mr. Yeats was hampered by no such 
limitations. 

The most potent influences among the 
young English writers of those days, 
which already seem so far off, were the 
French decadents and symbolists : Ver- 
laine, Mallarm6, Maeterlinck and the rest. 
Mr. Yeats was never attacked by the un- 
pleasant disease sometimes called Verlain- 
itis. He never paid court to the muse of 
Leicester Square. But symbolism had a 
strong attraction for him. Naturally in- 
clined towards mysticism, a student of 
the occultism of the East, he found in 
French literary symbolism a means of 
expression for that side of his nature. 
The blurring of outline, which Mallarme 
carried to such extravagant lengths, the 
correspondence of sounds and ideas which 
reached its logical and ridiculous conclusion 

59 



J. M. SYNGE 

in Arthur Raimbaud's famous sonnet, 
beginning : 

A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu, voyelles, 
Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes ; 

these tendencies found in Mr. Yeats, 
though no blind follower, their ablest 
English, or English-writing, exponent, as 
Mr. Arthur Symons acknowledged in dedi- 
cating to him his book on the Symbolist 
Movement. Not only did he employ 
symbols in his own work in a manner con- 
fusing to the laity, but he also found them 
in other men's work. His essay on Shelley's 
philosophy is a case in point. As he con- 
fesses in a later mood, " I only made my 
pleasure in him contented pleasure by 
massing in my imagination his recurring 
images of towers and rivers, and caves 
with fountains in them, and that one star 
of his, till his world had grown solid 
underfoot and consistent enough for the 
soul's habitation." His treatment of 
Blake's prophetic books was more justifi- 
able, though it aroused the wrath of 
Swinburne, who regarded all things 
mystical and " Celtic " with the sweeping 

60 



YEATS AND THE MOVEMENT 

prejudice which in him did duty for the 
sense of criticism. . . . And Mr. Yeats' 
own poetry became full of roses and flaming 
wings and hierarchies. 

These tendencies, however, are not 
prominent in his earliest work. The 
Poems of 1895, which comprise all the best 
verse from the books containing The 
Wanderings of Oisin and The Countess 
Cathleen, are mainly connected with the 
heroic legends and the popular beliefs of 
Ireland. Some of the songs have all the 
beauty, enshrined in far more than the 
art, of folk-music. Mr. Yeats seemed to 
have recaptured the pure spirit of song 
for song's sake which made our seventeenth 
century melodious. All the great romantic 
and Victorian poets, except Keats, were 
preoccupied, even though in their own 
despite, with some scheme of morality 
or immorality. The decadents were con- 
sciously in revolt against the conventions. 
Mr. Yeats was just calmly and musically 
emotional. But in The Wind among the 
Reeds of four years later, while the same 
virtue still flourishes, the esoteric is so 
much in evidence, that notes bulking 

61 



J. M. SYNGE 

nearly as large as the text are needed for 
its elucidation. 

These poems also have an Irish com- 
plexion, but the spirit, at least of some of 
them, came from the East by way of France. 
The soul of Mr. Yeats, at a particular stage 
of its development, is completely expressed ; 
but it is only here and there that the soul 
of Ireland makes a brief appearance. 

This temper made Mr. Yeats very aristo- 
cratic and exclusive. Art for him belonged 
to " a little company of studious persons." 
44 The crowds," he wrote, " may applaud 
good art for a time, but they will forget it 
when vulgarity invents some new thing, 
for the only permanent influence of any 
art is an influence that flows down gradually 
and imperceptibly, as if through orders 
and hierarchies." So he turned further 
and further from common life, writing : 

11 The arts are, I believe, about to take upon 
their shoulders the burdens that have lain upon 
the shoulders of priests, and to lead us back 
upon our journey by filling our thoughts with 
the essences of things, and not with things." 

He was a reverent admirer of Villiers 
62 



YEATS AND THE MOVEMENT 

de Tlsle Adam, the arch-symbolist, whose 
play Axel was the Hernani of the school ; 
who wrote, " As for living, our servants 
will do that for us," and supplied Mr. 
Yeats with a motto for his book of mystical 
tales, The Secret Rose. 

But if Mr. Yeats ever, in his quietism, 
forgot what in a later and rather petulant 
mood he has called " the seeming needs of 
my fool-driven land," it was only for a 
moment. He may have carried his pre- 
occupations with him ; for to see in the 
Irish peasant one whose " dream has 
never been entangled by reality," was to 
see something very different from what, 
not only Synge but a whole host of later 
dramatists has seen. But Mr. Yeats has 
himself reconciled his mysticism with his 
patriotism in his verses To Ireland in the 
Coming Times. 

Know that I would accounted be 
True brother of that company, 
Who sang to sweeten Ireland's wrong, 
Ballad and story, rann and song ; 
Nor be I any less of them, 
Because the red-rose-bordered hem 
Of her, whose history began 
Before God made the angelic clan, 

63 



J. M. SYNGE 

Trails all about the written page ; 
For in the world's first blossoming age 
The light fall of her flying feet 
Made Ireland's heart begin to beat ; 
And still the starry candles flare 
To help her light foot here and there ; 
And still the thoughts of Ireland brood 
Upon her holy quietude. 

Nor may I less be counted one 

With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson, 

Because to him, who ponders well, 

My rhymes more than their rhyming tell 

Of the dim wisdoms old and deep, 

That God gives unto man in sleep. 

For the elemental beings go 

About my table to and fro. 

In flood and fire and clay and wind, 

They huddle from man's pondering mind ; 

Yet he who treads in austere ways 

May surely meet their ancient gaze. 

Man ever journeys on with them 

After the red-rose-bordered hem. 

Ah, faeries, dancing under the moon, 

A Druid land, a Druid tune ! 

While still I may, I write for you 
The love I lived, the dream I knew. 
From our birthday, until we die, 
Is but the winking of an eye ; 
And we, our singing and our love, 
The mariners of night above, 
And all the wizard things that go 
About my table to and fro, 

64 



YEATS AND THE MOVEMENT 

Are passing on to where may be, 
In truth's consuming ecstasy, 
No place for love and dream at all ; 
For God goes by with white foot-fall. 
I cast my heart into my rhymes, 
That you, in the dim coming times, 
May know how my heart went with them 
After the red-rose-bordered hem. l 

Thus are synthesised two passions which 
might have been very quarrelsome lodgers 
in one breast. As a matter of fact, at the 
time of the publication of The Wind among 
the Reeds, Mr. Yeats was nearly at the end 
of that phase of his life when alchemy 
and mysticism were its predominant in- 
terests. The appearance of that book 
and the discovery of Synge in Paris 
cannot have been many months apart, 
and, as already stated, the elder man was 
at that time in the throes of reaction. 
There is a passage in The Adoration of the 
Magi — a short story wherein his interest 
in alchemy is most fully in evidence — 
which, with reservations, may be taken to 
describe his change of attitude. 

" I have turned into a pathway which will 
lead me . . . from the Order of the Alchemical 

1 Poems. By W. B. Yeats. (Fisher Unwin, 7s. 6d.). 

e 65 



J. M. SYNGE 

Rose. I no longer live an elaborate and 
haughty life, but seek to lose myself among the 
prayers and sorrows of the multitude." 

Moreover, Mr. Yeats was in Paris for 
the purpose of founding an Irish literary 
society ; and the Irish Literary Theatre, 
if not already in existence, was very near 
its birth. 



66 



THE IRISH THEATRE 

Mr. Yeats' fine ideal had long been to 
" spread a tradition of life that makes 
neither great wealth nor great poverty, 
that makes the arts a national expression 
of life, that permits even common men 
to understand good art and high thinking, 
and to have the fine manners these things 
can give." As early as 1892 he started 
the National Literary Society, hoping 
that this would eventually lead to the 
formation of a school of Irish drama. 
This hope was realised by the formation 
of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899. 

It is remarkable how dependent on Irish- 
men, from the Restoration onwards, 
England has been for her plays, or at any 
rate for her comedies. Congreve, though 
she fostered him, Ireland cannot claim ; 
but Farquhar was Irish, and so were Steele, 
Sheridan, Goldsmith, Wilde and Shaw ; 
not to mention such lesser lights as Macklin, 
Sheridan Knowles and Dion Boucicault. 

67 



J. M. SYNGE 

Yet, a dozen years ago, Ireland had never 
had a national drama. 

The names just cited, and the inability 
of populous England to match them, were 
sufficient evidence of an Irish genius for 
drama which only needed organisation 
and encouragement. Such organisation 
and encouragement were offered by Mr. 
Yeats' venture. 

The ideals which Mr. Yeats set out to 
realise cannot be better stated than by quot- 
ing a few passages from his essay on "The 
Reform of the Theatre," which appeared 
in the third issue of Samhain, the occasional 
organ of the National Theatre Society. 
" We have to write or find plays that will 
make the theatre a place of intellectual 
excitement. ... If we are to do this 
we must learn that beauty and truth are 
always justified of themselves, and that 
their creation is a greater service to our 
country than writing that compromises 
either in the seeming service of a cause. 
. . . Such plays will require, both in 
writers and audiences, a stronger feeling 
for beautiful and appropriate^language 
than one finds in the ordinary theatre. 

68 



THE IRISH THEATRE 

. . . One must be able to make a king of 
faery or an old countryman or a modern 
lover speak that language which is his 
and nobody's else's, and speak it with so 
much of emotional subtlety that the hearer 
may find it hard to know whether it is the 
thought or the word that has moved him, 
or whether these could be separated at 
all." The presentation of these ideal plays 
was to be aided by a simplification of act- 
ing, scenery and costumes, and especially 
by a reformation in the art of speaking 
verse. This last has always been very 
near Mr. Yeats' heart. He abhors the 
absurd habit, which obtains in the English 
theatre, of speaking blank verse as though 
it were bad prose. But unfortunately he 
has found few companions in sanity. 

Mr. Yeats' partners in the establish- 
ment of the Irish Literary Theatre were 
Lady Gregory and Mr. Edward Martyn. 
They were soon joined by Mr. George 
Moore, the novelist, who had a practical 
knowledge of theatrical matters. Their 
first performance took place on May 8th, 
1899, at the Antient Concert Rooms in 
Dublin, the bill consisting of The Countess 

69 



J. M. SYNGE 

Cathleen, by Yeats, and The Heather Field, 
by Marty n. Both these plays have a 
significant note of symbolism, though 
there their resemblance ends. The scene 
of The Countess Cathleen, which was 
written several years earlier, lies in the 
Elizabethan or any age. It is fine poetry 
and contains some beautiful songs. The 
Heather Field is modern, but except that 
it is concerned with the eternal conflict 
between the dream and the business, it 
has little in common with the later Irish 
products. In both this and the same 
author's Maeve, played in the following 
season, the central figure is troubled by 
visions of an unattainable beauty, and 
worn out in the end by that and by contact 
with the worldlings. 

The performances in the Antient Concert 
Rooms, though marred by every defect of 
staging, were so successful that in the fol- 
lowing year the society was offered the use 
of the Gaiety Theatre. There was played 
Mr. Moore's Bending of the Bough, a satire 
on Irish municipal life, in which the influence 
of Ibsen is strong. Heroic Ireland was 
represented by Miss Alice Milligan's The 

70 



THE IRISH THEATRE 

Last Feast of the Fianna. The season of 
1901 was mainly remarkable for the pro- 
duction of the first play in Gaelic, The 
Twisting of the Rope, by Dr. Douglas 
Hyde, President of the Gaelic League. 
Although the National Theatre Society 
does not now produce Gaelic plays, a 
movement was started which has helped 
the Gaelic League much in their efforts 
to restore to Ireland its ancient language. 
That year, however, saw the end of 
the Irish Literary Theatre as originally 
conceived, and the defection of Mr. Martyn 
and Mr. Moore. In 1902 a company of 
Irish players, 1 under the direction of 
Messrs. William and Frank Fay, two of 
the finest actors the movement has pro- 
duced, performed several interesting plays, 
including Mr. Yeats' beautiful little Cathleen 
ni Houlihan, the Deirdre of A. E., already 
mentioned as being written in the prose of 
a poet but without much sense of drama, 
and Mr. Fred Ryan's satirical The Laying 
of the Foundations, which may perhaps 
be regarded as the prototype of many 

1 The Irish Literary Theatre had had to put up with 
English actors. 

71 



J. M. SYNGE 

plays since produced. The two last-named 
are the only dramatic writings of their 
respective authors. 

In March 1903 the Irish National 
Theatre Society was founded " to continue 
on a more permanent basis the work of 
the Irish Literary Theatre." It started 
life in Molesworth Hall, Dublin, and among 
its earliest productions were the first 
plays of Synge, Lady Gregory and Mr. 
Padraic Colum. In the following year 
Miss A. E. F. Horniman, a splendid friend 
to drama, placed the Abbey Theatre at 
the society's disposal. That theatre is now 
identified with one of the most interesting 
movements of recent years. About the 
end of 1905 the society became a limited 
company. The players, who at first gave 
their services, are now paid ; but this 
change has brought with it no taint of 
commercialism. The acting of Miss Sara 
Allgood, Miss Maire O'Neill, Mr. Arthur 
Sinclair, and their colleagues, is as certainly 
inspired by a love of their art as is the work 
of the writers who still find in that work 
their only reward. 

Such, in brief, is the story of the mechani- 

72 



THE IRISH THEATRE 

cal development of the Irish Theatre. 
Its spiritual history is not so obvious. 
Many writers have come into the move- 
ment, either to stay or to depart, and each 
has had his own methods and point of view. 
For one of the most admirable things 
about both the poets and the dramatists 
of modern Ireland has been their sincerity. 
Subject to influences they have certainly 
been ; the greatest artists are that. But of 
slavish imitation there has been remarkably 
little. The work of nearly every writer has 
a clear character of its own. Still, it is 
possible, at any rate among the modern 
plays, to trace an organic change. 

This may be called, very roughly, the 
substitution of the spirit of Synge for the 
spirit of Ibsen. Very naturally the men 
who started the theatre had him who 
single-handed had created a national drama 
for Norway constantly in their minds. 
The common factor in the work of Mr. 
Martyn and Mr. Moore is Ibsen's influence. 
This influence was never again to appear 
so strongly, though it may still be traced 
perhaps in some of those searching criti- 
cisms to which later writers (such as Mr. 

73 



J. M. SYNGE 

Padraic Colum in Thomas Muskerry) have 
subjected their country. But Synge con- 
sidered Ibsen's " joyless and pallid words " 
" as old-fashioned as the pharmacopoeia 
of Galen." That Synge altered the tone 
of the theatre it would be hardy to assert ; 
but it must be remembered, not only that 
he was the strongest man connected with 
it, but also that he had a voice in the 
selection of plays for performance. At 
any rate, that series of plays which might 
be described as kitchen drama, and is now 
the society's most characteristic feature, 
began with In the Shadow of the Glen. 

These plays, though a problem is often 
involved, are mainly interesting, to the 
Englishman at least, by the richness and 
wit of their dialogue. It is there that the 
writers most fully display their individu- 
alities. " Lady Gregory," says Mr. Yeats, 
" has written of the people of the markets 
and villages of the West, and their speech, 
though less full of peculiar idiom than that 
of Mr. Synge' s people, is always that 
vivid speech which has been shaped through 
some generations of English speaking by 
those who still think in Gaelic. Mr. 

74 



THE IRISH THEATRE 

Colum and Mr. Boyle, on the other hand, 
write of the countryman or the villager 
of the East or centre of Ireland, who thinks 
in English, and the speech of their people 
shows the influence of the newspaper 
and the National Schools. The people they 
write of, too, are not true folk ; they are 
the peasant as he is being transformed 
by modern life, and for that very reason 
the man of the towns may find it easier 
to understand them." 

Corrupted or not, the Irish idiom as 
written by Mr. Colum and Mr. Boyle is an 
excellent language for the stage ; that of 
Mr. Colum is particularly nervous and 
terse. The following fragment, taken 
practically at random from The Fiddler s 
House, gives its quality : 

" Brian. We didn't finish to-day. I'll come 
in to-morrow and finish. 

Maire. O no, Brian, we won't take another 
day from you. 

Brian. Well, what's a day after all ? 
Many's the day and night I put in thinking 
on you. 

Maire. But did you do what I asked you 
to do? 

75 



J. M. SYNGE 

Brian. I did. I made it up with my brother. 
It was never my way before. What I wanted 
I took with the strong hand ; or if I mightn't 
put the strong hand on it, I left it alone. 

Maire (eagerly). Tell me what your brother 
said to you. 

Brian. When I came up to the door, Hugh 
came out to meet me. ' What destruction are 
you bringing me?' he said. c There's my 
hand,' says I, c and I take your offer.' " 

Mr. Colum is one of the best dramatists 
the Irish Theatre has produced. His 
characterisation is very real. Each of his 
three plays, The Land, The Fiddler's House, 
and Thomas Muskerry, is concerned with 
the conflict between the family and the 
individual w r ill, but this repeated statement 
of a problem is not monotonous. 

Mr. William Boyle's Mineral Workers 
is one of the most elaborate as well as 
one of the most interesting plays in the 
annals of the Abbey Theatre. His Building 
Fund is a clever little comedy. Mr. Boyle 
left the society after the production of The 
Playboy. But he eventually returned, and 
his plays are now often performed. 

Except Mr. Yeats, no writer has worked 

76 



THE IRISH THEATRE 

harder in the national cause than Lady 
Gregory. She was the first to use the now 
familiar dialect. By her renderings of the 
great Irish legends of the Red Branch and the 
Fianna (Cuchulain of Muirthemne and Gods 
and Fighting Men), she has left no excuse 
for that ignorance which so hampered the 
writers of romantic plays and made elabo- 
rate explanatory notes a necessary feature 
of Abbey Theatre programmes. She has 
turned certain plays of Moliere into the 
Irish idiom, and these have been performed 
at the theatre. She herself has written 
plays founded on national legend and 
national history. But her best and most 
characteristic are her one-act plays of 
modern Irish life. Her little comedies, 
usually turning on some absurd mis- 
understanding, are written with a wonderful 
verbal dexterity. The racy quality of 
Hyacinth Halvey and Spreading the News 
is inimitable. The Rising of the Moon is 
comedy touched with an exquisite pathos, 
while The Gaol Gate proves that she has 
a sure mastery of poignant tragedy. Her 
three-act play, The Image, is less satis- 
factory ; but Seven Short Plays is as good, 

77 



J. M. SYNGE 

in its own way, as anything in modern 
literature. 

Mr. Norreys Connell, Mr. S. L. Robinson, 
Mr. T. C. Murray and Mr. St. John Ervine 
are writers who deserve attention. Mr. 
Rutherford Mayne, whose plays have been 
produced by the Ulster Literary Theatre, 
the most important follower of the National 
Theatre Society, is interesting as an example 
of the fidelity to locality which many of 
these dramatists practise. His scenes are 
always laid in County Down, and his 
characters speak the Irish of Ulster, 
which is more like the Scots. The Troth 
is a powerful miniature tragedy of tenant 
and landlord. Like Lady Gregory, Mr. 
Mayne does better in one act than in three, 
and thus bears witness to the wisdom of 
Mr. Yeats' advice, that writers for the 
theatre should begin, at all events, with 
simple situations. 

Mr. Bernard Shaw, it may be mentioned 
by the way, wrote John BulVs Other Island 
expressly for the society, which, however, 
did not feel itself capable of producing 
so elaborate a work. 

One of the objects of the founders of the 

78 



THE IRISH THEATRE 

National Theatre Society was to present 
Irishmen with versions of their heroic 
legends. A few attempts to do this have 
already been named : Miss Milligan's Last 
Feast of the Fianna ; the Deirdres ; Lady 
Gregory's Dervorgilla. But it has turned 
out that nearly all the best talent which 
has been placed at the society's service 
has occupied itself with modern themes. 
So Mr. Yeats, almost alone, has supplied 
the romantic element. 

Long before the first performance in the 
Antient Concert Rooms Mr. Yeats had 
been writing plays. The Countess Cathleen 
was published in 1892, The Land of Heart's 
Desire in 1894. When engaged on these, 
their author no doubt hoped that one day 
they would be acted in a national theatre. 
That hope has been fulfilled, and Mr. 
Yeats, the subjective lyrist, has offered 
himself for judgment as a dramatist. 

Remembering all that Mr. Yeats has 
done for the theatre, it seems ungracious 
to insist that the drama is not his proper 
sphere. Yet, as he admits, friends as well 
as critics have urged the point, regretting 
that he should neglect his gift of beautiful 

79 



J. M. SYNGE 

lyric utterance. He has answered that 
drama has been to him " the search for 
more of manful energy, more of cheerful 
acceptance of the logic of events, and for 
clear outline, instead of those outlines of 
lyric poetry that are blurred with desire 
and vague regrets." And certainly his 
practical interest in the theatre has wrought 
a change in his attitude towards life and 
art. He has come out of his old brooding 
and developed his humanity. 

In Samhain, and in the book of essays 
called Discoveries (1907), he has expounded 
his new philosophy. He who once wished 
to " cast out of serious poetry those ener- 
getic rhythms, as of a man running," could 
five years later write : 

" All good art is extravagant, vehement, 
impetuous, shaking the dust of time from its 
feet, as it were, and beating against the walls of 
the world." 

He desires in art " intensity of personal 
life, . . . the strength, the essential moment 
of a man who would be exciting in the 
market or at the dispensary door." Music 
does not interest him, being too impersonal, 

80 



THE IRISH THEATRE 

but he can rejoice in the vitality of a girl 
playing on a banjo. He is a little bitter 
about his old desire for impersonal beauty 
and intellectual essences, and cares to 
ascend out of common interests " only so 
far as we can carry the normal, passionate, 
reasoning self, the personality as a whole." 
He has indeed deserted the Alchemical 
Rose. 

And yet, when one turns to his plays, 
one finds that he has not quite been able 
to fulfil his new ideal. He may be no 16nger 
the alchemist, but he is still the purest 
lyrist of his generation. He is as subjective 
as ever. His plays are but the portioning 
of his dream among many mouths. He is 
too impatient of all but essentials to accept 
those conventions to which every dramatist 
must submit. His plays are never bad plays, 
and they are always good to read as poems ; 
some of them, such as Deirdre and The 
Shadowy Waters, being among the most 
beautiful poetry that he has written. But 
instead of gaining by actual dramatic 
presentation, as even the most poetic plays 
should, they lose a good deal of their 
beauty. Moments of them come to us 

f 81 



J. M. SYNGE 

urgently, but as poetry rather than as 
drama, and in spite of the footlights. 
But since no play either can or should stay 
always at its highest point, the lower levels 
lose their poetry among the stage furniture 
without taking on that likeness of daily 
life which, in the theatre, keeps us interested 
in the intervals of emotion. Mr. Yeats' 
verse plays are lyrics spoiled of half their 
loveliness by the ugly mechanism of the 
stage, while his prose plays are pallid for 
lack of earthly circumstance. It is only 
in very short plays, such as Cathleen ni 
Houlihan, where the interest has not 
to be sustained long, that he is really 
successful. 

In an ideal theatre, with an ideal 
utterance of verse, such as Mr. Yeats and 
Mr. Gordon Craig have desired, Deirdre and 
The Shadowy Waters would also be ideal. 
But human drama has to be written for 
human conditions. 

Realising the defects of his virtues, 
Mr. Yeats has continually rewritten his 
plays, striving for a more compelling vitality; 
getting, probably, as near as his nature 
will allow him to the dramatic. To those 

82 



THE IRISH THEATRE 

who have remonstrated he has finely 
replied : 

The friends that have it I do wrong 
Whenever I remake a song, 
Should know what issue is at stake : 
It is myself that I remake. 

That is the word of a man whose work is 
his personality. Driven before the wind 
of his own development, he has written 
as he must. This is no plainer anywhere 
than in his latest book, which contains a 
" heroic farce," The Green Helmet, and a 
number of lyrics. The Green Helmet, 
a short piece in one act, has a buoyant 
vitality and a fine irreverence which must 
surprise anyone who has been accustomed 
to think of Mr. Yeats as, say, the writer 
of The Shadowy Waters. It also shows 
an advance in his sense of drama, and 
suggests that the future may, after all, 
stultify the remonstrants even in their own 
eyes. The lyrics also are of a documentary 
interest. Some of them have a harshness 
and deliberate crudity which are the very 
antitheses of the murmurous melody of his 
old songs. But they are nevertheless in the 
logical line of Mr. Yeats' development, and 

83 



J. M. SYNGE 

are obviously the somewhat pungent fruit 
of personal experience. Mr. Yeats has had 
his share of the disillusion which inevitably 
comes to the idealist who handles reality. 
He has had to give much time, which 
would otherwise have been devoted to 
thought and creation, to weary mechanical 
details. Doubtless there have been failures 
and disappointments. His audiences, pre- 
occupied with politics, have been at least 
as alert for an adverse opinion as for 
artistic excellence. Not only Synge's plays, 
but others, such as Lady Gregory's Rising 
of the Moon and Mr. Connell's Piper, have 
been met with antagonism. These things 
are apt to turn to bitterness in the sensitive 
mind of a poet. 

Still, looking back on the whole work 
of the last dozen years, Mr. Yeats has little 
cause for dissatisfaction. The National 
Theatre Society has succeeded beyond 
all hope, though by no means beyond desert. 
Its founder could still write, as he proudly 
wrote five years ago : " We . . . can say, 
as the artist can in every other art, ' We 
will give you nothing that does not please 
ourselves, and if you do not like it, and we 

84 



THE IRISH THEATRE 

are still confident that it is good, we will 
set it before you again, and trust to chang- 
ing taste.' All true arts, as distinguished 
from their commercial and mechanical 
imitation, are a festival where it is the 
fiddler who calls the tune." 



85 



VI 

THE LYRISTS 

And while the theatre has been establishing 
itself more and more firmly as a national 
institution, the lyre has given forth no 
attenuated music. A mere list of those 
who have handled it would cover pages. 
Most of them, indeed, are very minor 
players. In a school much mere school-work 
is bound to be done. Yet the quantity of 
genuine, if not great, poetry, issued in 
Ireland in recent years, is a tribute to the 
power of enthusiasm. 

This poetry is full of what Synge has 
called " the pang of emotion one meets 
everywhere in Ireland — an emotion that 
is partly local and patriotic, and partly 
a share of the desolation that is mixed 
everywhere with the supreme beauty of 
the world." 

Mr. Seumas O' Sullivan, a typical poet 
of the school, has struck the precise note 
in the lines : 

86 



THE LYRISTS 

It is a whisper among the hazel bushes ; 

It is a long, low, whispering voice that fills 
With a sad music the bending and swaying rushes, 

It is a heart beat deep in the quiet hills. 

This brooding melancholy— which has 
long been connected with the Celt, and was 
prominent in the work of " -Fiona Macleod " 
as well as in that of Mr. Yeats and Lionel 
Johnson — is the predominant mood of 
such writers as Miss Ella Young, Miss 
Eva Gore-Booth, Mr. Thomas Keohler 
and the late Miss Ethna Carbery. 

It is present also in the more individual 
work of A. E. (Mr. George W. Russell). 
A painter, a delicate critic, with the fine 
prose style which made his Deirdre play 
good to read, a clear and practical writer 
on Irish economics, A. E. is a poet who 
can stand without the support of the 
brothers and sisters of a movement. He 
is a mystic, though not of the cabalistic 
order ; his is the mysticism of the passion- 
ate pantheist. 

So love, a burning multitude, a seraph wind which 

blows 
From out the deep of being to the deep of being 

goes : 

87 



J. M. SYNGE 

And sun and moon and starry fires and earth and air 

and sea 
Are creatures from the deep let loose who pause in 

ecstasy ; 
Or wing their wild and heavenly way until again they 

find 
The ancient deep and fade therein, enraptured, bright 

and blind. 



A. E.'s poetry is full of an elusive ecstasy, 
made the more wraith-like by the subtle 
cadences of its verse. 

Mystics also are Mr. John Eglinton; 
Mr. Charles Weekes, whose brief, con- 
centrated poems are the utterances of a 
sincere and deep intellectual force ; and 
Miss Susan L. Mitchell. 

Typical in their simplicity and their note 
of faery and dream are the poems of 
the late Nora Hopper (Mrs. Chesson), 
who stood at the head of the movement 
with Mr. Yeats and Lionel Johnson and 
Mrs. Tynan-Hinkson. 

Simplicity, again, is one of the virtues 
in the dialect poems of " Moira O'Neill," 
and in the very different work of Mr. 
Seosamh MacCathmhaoil and Mr. Padraic 
Colum. Mr. Colum has got a fine tang 

88 



THE LYRISTS 

of the peat and the keen mountain wind 
into his Wild Earth. His unrhymed poem 
of The Plougher is one of the most dis- 
tinctive poems lately written. In Mr. 
MacCathmhaoil's verses simplicity is carried 
even to nakedness. But they have a magic 
of their own, and are full both of piety and 
of patriotism. 

It need hardly be said that patriotism 
is the original motive of most of this 
modern Irish poetry. Attachment to 
the very soil of Ireland, or of little Irish 
places, finds repeated expression, while 
the devoted Irish dead have many cele- 
brants. 

She moves most sad and beautiful 

Amid her hills of green ; 
She weeps the brave, the dutiful, 

Who owned her once for queen. 

That is the constant sentiment, not 
only of Mr. Shane Leslie, who wrote these 
lines, but of a score of others. Among those 
who have devoted themselves most ex- 
plicitly to themes of their country may be 
mentioned Miss Alice Milligan and Mr. 
James H. Cousins. Miss Milligan has sung 

f2 89 



J. M. SYNGE 

the heroic legends, while Mr. Cousins' verse 
is permeated with Irish lore. A picturesque 
version of a famous story is Mr. Herbert 
Trench's Deirdre Wed; but Mr. Trench 
has made very free with his original 
and does not in any way belong to the 
school. Miss Jane Barlow, again, though 
her themes are mainly Irish, has a strongly 
individual note, and must be accounted 
an independent. 

But with the exception of the two 
writers last named, and perhaps of Mr. 
Charles Weekes, all the poets and poetesses 
so inadequately characterised in the fore- 
going pages, however various their quality, 
belong to the tradition. Consciously or 
unconsciously, they have all accepted 
and expressed the idea of the gentle, 
melancholy, down-trodden Gael, living 
among past glories and future hopes. 
And it is noticeable that the most marked 
individuality is to be found among the 
older writers, such as A. E. and Miss Barlow. 
Recently, however, a new voice has been 
heard. Mr. James Stephens, who, by calling 
his book Insurrections, would seem to hoist 
a flag, has his own grim and humorous 

90 



THE LYRISTS 

view of life which is far removed from, 
if not actually hostile to, the Celtic con- 
vention. Mr. Stephens' w r ork is already 
strong. If it grows strong enough to 
become an influence, it may bring a new 
element into Irish poetry. 



91 



VII 

synge's poems 

In his realism Mr. Stephens resembles 
Synge, though the two men have little 
else in common. But Synge also was in 
revolt against the traditions of poetry; 
and it is that fact, rather than their intrinsic 
value, which gives his verses their interest. 
They are the most complete personal 
revelations which he has left us, showing 
us the man with all his " astringent joy and 
hardness." 

In the short preface, written three months 
before he died for the volume of Poems and 
Translations which was not issued until 
after his death, Synge explained his theory 
of poetry. He felt that modern poetry 
had got too far away from life, both in its 
language and in its material. Men like 
Villon and Herrick and Burns had put the 
whole of their experience into their verse, 
which had consequently appealed to men 
and not to cliques. The poetry of exalta- 
tion would always be the highest, but 

92 



SYNGE'S POEMS 

" the strong things of life are needed in 
poetry also, to show that what is exalted, 
or tender, is not made by feeble blood. 
It may almost be said," he concludes, 
" that before verse can be human again 
it must learn to be brutal." 

His poems, he explains, were for the most 
part composed before these views were 
formulated, but they might have been 
written in their support. The majority 
of them were, indeed, written towards 
the end of his life. In a letter to 
Mr. Yeats, dated September 1908, he 
says, " You will gather that I am most 
interested now in my grimmer verses, 
and the ballads (which are from actual 
life)." Energy, being a rare quality in 
modern literature, is usually self-conscious 
and proclaims its presence on the big 
drum ; and Synge, though there w r as so 
much in him that was genuinely Eliza- 
bethan, turned a little hectically towards 
violence as he felt life slipping away. 
In such poems as In May, A Question, and 
the mocking Curse on one who disapproved 
of The Playboy, he successfully achieves 
the brutality of which he speaks ; and only 

93 



J. M. SYNGE 

in the first instance without detriment to 
the poetry. 

So, again, against a certain kind of 
romance he is very violent. The Passing 
of the Shee — " Ye plumed yet skinny Shee " 
— has often been quoted, and might be 
profitably compared with Mr. Yeats' Hosting 
of the Sidhe as a study in points of view. In 
Queens, after naming with scant reverence 
the royal ladies of story, he concludes : 

Yet these are rotten — I ask their pardon — 
And weVe the sun on rock and garden, 
These are rotten, so you're the Queen 
Of all are living, or have been. 

Such exaltation of the living above the 
dead is sound philosophy; but, if it had been 
Synge's from the beginning, it is doubt- 
ful whether he would have given it such 
vehement expression. These poems rather 
suggest that he, too, had trod the vague 
paths of dreamland, and was angry with 
himself for so doing. There is a touch of 
temper about them, which makes one feel 
that they were written in reaction rather 
than in a normal mood. He translated 
Petrarch into that prose of his which is 

94 



SYNGE'S POEMS 

so much fuller of beauty than his verse ; 
but when he translated Villon, he chose the 
Complaint of the Fair Armouress with its 
implacable realism rather than the Ballade 
of the Ladies of Old Ti?ne, which he doubt- 
less thought fittingly rendered in the 
" poetic diction " of Rossetti. 

By far the best of his poems are those 
connected with the peasant life of the Aran 
Islands. They have the same selective 
realism as his plays and a purely spon- 
taneous vitality. " Reality and joy " are 
at their highest in Beg-Innish, and some of 
his ballads have rarely been surpassed since 
ballad-making became an anachronism. 
Whatever their limitations, there is always 
a good smell of earth about Synge's 
verses, and that clarity of atmosphere 
which is round all his work and makes him 
comparable with no other modern poet 
so aptly as with Mr. A. E. Housman, of 
The Shropshire Lad. 

Still, the most valuable quality of these 
poems is that they are the personal confes- 
sions of an artist whose real art was objec- 
tive. They enable us to understand how it 

95 



J. M. SYNGE 

was that Synge was satisfied neither with 
modern romance, nor with modern sym- 
bolism, nor with modern realism, but 
turned into the path which English litera- 
ture had left for nearly three hundred 
years ; leaving which, it had lost its 
drama. 



SOME ESTIMATES OF SYNGE, Etc. 

Yeats, W. B. . . Synge and the Ireland of 
his Time. 1911. 

Masefield, John . John M. Synge. 

Contemporary Review, April, 1911. 

Tennyson, Charles Irish Plays and Playwrights. 
Quarterly Review, July, 1911. 

Tennyson, Charles The Rise of the Irish Theatre. 

Contemporary Review, August, 1911. 

Figgis, Darrell . The Art of J. M. Synge. 

Fortnightly Review, December, 1911. 

Bickley, Francis . Synge and the Drama. 

New Quarterly, February, 1910. 



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